Backblaze Builds a Data Center It Hopes to Fill with 500 Petabytes of Data

Building a data center in the cloud

Cloud backup company Backblaze has a secret and it's a big one. How big? Try an exabyte. That's how much data Backblaze hopes to be able to store at its relatively new data center in the Sacramento area. We didn't know about it because Backblaze never revealed any details about the facility until now. It's located just outside of Sacramento and away from any earthquake fault zones and flood plains.

It's also considered to be an area that's "very low risk" for tornadoes, so that's one less thing to worry about. Furthermore, the data center has SAS 70 Type II and ISO 9001 certifications and is PCI-DSS compliant, in case you're interested in counting bullet points.

Backblaze says it's been a year since the Sacramento data center first began accepting customer data, and by September 2013, all new customer accounts were being serviced there. At the time Backblaze started looking for a new data center (August 2012), it was hosting 40 petabytes of data.

"We expect to be able to store about 1/2 an exabyte (500 petabytes) of customer data at our new data center," Backblaze said. "That should last us a little while but just in case the operations folks are already scouting locations in Lake Tahoe for the next data center."